Searching for Madame Nhu

Katie Baker is the managing editor of the Women in the World channel at Newsweek/The Daily Beast.

Saigon, 1963: The city slinks toward a feverish violence. On the
streets, monks set themselves alight to protest the government’s
anti-Buddhist bent. Dissenters plot in secret among the Army’s ranks. In
squalid prisons, students and political enemies rot in soiled tiger
cages. And ensconced in Independence Palace, the insular ruling family
prepares for martial law and inflates reports of their success against
the Viet Cong. But the Americans backing the fragile South Vietnamese
regime are growing disillusioned with President Ngo Dinh Diem and his
pampered relatives and want the lot of them gone: the stubborn,
inexperienced Diem, his ruthless younger brother, and particularly
Diem’s sister-in-law, the woman John F. Kennedy refers to as “that
goddam bitch”—the vain, calculating first lady, otherwise known as the
infamous Madame Nhu.

At the peak of her powers, with her bewitching beauty and relentless
ambition, Madame Nhu inflamed the imagination and provoked the hatred of
the West and the Vietnamese alike. Time and Life featured her on their covers and called her a “devious” enchantress; The New York Times
crowned her “the most powerful” woman in Asia and compared her to the
Borgias. She was described as “proud and vain,” an “Ian Fleming
character come to life,” “as innocent as a cobra,” an “Oriental
Valkyrie.” Jackie Kennedy thought she had a “queer thing for power,” and
the AP’s fellow in Saigon, Malcolm Browne,
knew her to be “the most dangerous enemy a man could have.” Her
penchant for tightly fitted sheaths and scarlet fingernails played into
her image as a grande coquette, and her name became synonymous
with feminine wickedness: Jackie used it as a slur for ladies she
disliked, while Yoko Ono haters branded the Beatles interloper “Lennon’s
Madame Nhu.”

But Madame Nhu’s rise to notoriety and influence was short-lived. In
the autumn of ’63, a U.S.-backed coup deposed and disposed of her
husband and brother-in-law, leaving her a hunted woman hiding out half a
world away. After a few empty promises to sell her memoirs to Hollywood
and make a comeback when the communists fell, Madame Nhu disappeared
into obscurity—until an academic named Monique Demery tracked her down
in the mid-2000s, begging her to tell her side of South Vietnam’s sad
story. Thus began a cat-and-mouse game that culminated in Demery’s new
book, Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam’s Madame Nhu.
It’s a deeply intriguing, occasionally problematic work, one that
struggles to find its way into the inner character of a narrator so
unreliable, she makes Patrick Bateman
look like a straight shooter—a woman still intoxicated by her faded
glory and half mad from years as a recluse who comes across as
ambivalently needy and terribly arrogant, conniving and pitiable, and
shrewdly astute, often all at once....